Hector Berlioz, professional closer

The suit says “fashionable artiste,” but the hair says “blowin’ hella chronic smoke.”

Hector Berlioz is an interesting character in music history, the first real Romantic in the “it seems shockingly apparent that this guy, aside from his genius as a writer of music, is dangerously fucking unstable” way that would dominate the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He’s the first great example of a musician who found new avenues of expression in the realm of drugs and alcohol, showing the way for a group that includes the likes of Mussorgsky, Dr. Dre, Amy Winehouse, and that one guy who overdosed after making that one good album. Berlioz redefined the orchestra and wrote a book about it, shaping the way in which all future composers used the orchestral palette (by way of example, listen to the trombone parts in Beethoven 9 and then listen to the trombone parts in Symphonie Fantastique, works written 6 years apart).

Something to listen to: Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Cynical composer is cynical.

Let me begin this post with a deliberately provocative statement: You know, when I look back on the 20^th century, I feel like there were some highs and some lows.  Whew.  I said it.  From the ups (civil rights for African-Americans, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Bolton singing “When a Man Loves a Woman”) to the downs (Nazism, the Great Depression, the films of Dennis Quaid), the 1900’s were not for the faint of heart.  The role of the artist in this tumultuous context took on an entirely new dimension, and art and politics intersected in a way that we will almost assuredly never see again (sorry Sean Penn!).  Artists reflected their time and place in amazing ways, from the poetry of Anna Akhmatova to the art of Diego Rivera, from the novels of Kurt Vonnegut to the music of N.W.A.  In the realm of classical music, the most famous example of this is surely Dmitri Shostakovich, whose roller-coaster ride with Stalin is well known.  But perhaps no composer exemplified the turbulence of the century more than Bernhard Alois Zimmermann.